Hello again, Custodians!
It's been a lot longer than any of us wanted, getting where we're going. Unfortunately, the terrible luck that plagued the dev team for the first entire half of this year has continued, only mildly abated by the increasing improbability of the run. Unlike in our game, life's dice rolls are not guaranteed to be fair.
That has not stopped us from continuing to work on the game as we can, and we are proud to bring you today's update as a token of our determination.
New features
Command Console
First and foremost - the eternally-broken console in your Command cubby now does something. Specifically, it lets you read those Mission Commands that suffuse so much of your life as a Custodian. You no longer need to quickly memorize what an MC is when Robbie psychotically barks one out - you only need the number, and you can look it up. At long last, you can, in fact, refer to MC.419 for clarification! Of... something, anyway.
If you read carefully, the MCs are another way to piece together some of the deeper secrets of the vessel. Be careful to consider the source, however...
(Also, don't blame us for the interface to the console. One of the Custodians made it. Seriously!)
Numerical tooltips
One thing we have always been sticklers about in our game, versus some other multiple choice games, is that we want to be very, VERY clear about the consequences of clicking on an option. As amazing as games like King of Dragon Pass and World of Horror are, it's undeniable that memorizing the events is part of mastering those games.
We have always rejected this in Endless Dark. If you are expected to be responsible for your actions, we must give you information on what your actions will do.
With this patch, we take that a step further. We were unsatisfied with the Fatigue, Stress, and Psychosis bars simply flashing their general status after a change. Now, in addition to the bars flashing the change, we tell you, in no uncertain terms, exactly where the numbers will land:
This also takes into account ancillary effects, such as the stress overflow from capping Fatigue:
This just works in general, and requires no extra code on the part of modders. On a related note...
More modding hooks and tools.
The modding framework has been slowly upgraded over the last few months as we work with a few of our volunteer modders in Discord. As a reminder, Endless Dark is on Nexus Mods, and Soulmata's example mod is ready to tutorialize anyone interested in cracking open the game. We'll be publishing more documentation as a Steam guide as we have time to write it all down, and obviously, the Steam Workshop is our ultimate goal. The Discord server remains a great way to talk to other modders, us developers, and other fans of the game.
More art and music
The programmer art for all of the toasts has been removed and replaced with much more attractive tiles. In addition, another 3 songs from our composer have been added, to get everyone even more music variety between turns.
Bug Fixes
The game is rapidly running out of major bugs to fix, but as we keep testing everything, we invariably find more stuff to sort out.
- Doors and Thrusters now have a Leave option at the bottom, making them consistent with the other menus.
- An issue with the Sentimental perk allowed for infinite stress reduction - this has been fixed, and Sentimental now only works once per turn.
- Arc 4 had numerous bugs, plus a potential softlock, owing to older code styles we have since stopped using. They have all been fixed.
- Under certain rare conditions, tooltips could crash the game. This has been fixed.
- Event options could display irregularly under certain rare conditions. This has been fixed.
- The modapi's 'is_system_working' function could return "true" if a system was disabled, but not broken. It now correctly returns "false" if a system is broken, or disabled.
- The finale's story tile was causing some unpredictable behavior if a player clicked it, and then tried to start the game. As we are intending to have the finale done pretty soon, we have simply hidden the finale's story tile for the moment. This is a temporary measure.
Next up...
As implied above, the finale of the story remains our top priority. We've had to write a substantial amount of new code for it - the arc kicks off with a big curve ball that is sure to throw many of you for a loop. We also have a number of ongoing streamlines, some fixes to the functionality for Endless Mode, and, of course, the Steam Workshop integration on our plates.
Please don't forget to leave a review for us on Steam! It is the best way to help us out - if you like the game, we love hearing it! If you've got issues with the game, we are eager to listen to you!
Until next time, Custodians. We hope to see you again very soon!